The keyboard layout project

How about this - The Workman Keyboard Layout http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-differe...

But the layout is just one of the problems. The key staggering is also not very ergonomic. There are two cool keyboards featuring symmetric key positioning:

- Truly ergonomic keyboard http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php

- Type matrix http://typematrix.com

For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed.

So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the part of the keyboard that you would optimize for. Typing 5 minutes a day at a relaxed pace would be enough time to cover each of those 8 times in a month, so collecting enough data to work with would be feasible pretty quickly. I was then going to take a big textual corpus of English, and the total of all transition times would serve as the fitness function.

I had the data collection program done, and was starting to collect data, when I decided I should redo it with triples (of which there are 35,937). Then the length of the data collection process I was looking at became really daunting, and I lost interest in the project.

What I'd quite like to do, though, would be to crowdsource the data collection using a web app. Then I could get good three-key data and not have it biased to my own personal quirks.

- ErgoDox: split, non-staggered, programmable, mechanical, all-around awesome. http://ergodox.org/

It should roll around before the end of the year, group buy happens at http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=22780.0

As for layout, I suggest Colemak with a custom alt layer such as http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=5001#p5001

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed?

The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at least 5 times better and easy to learn (less than 1 day), just for people to "consider" it due to the migration costs.

Fun story- I come from France, where everybody uses the azerty layout for some copyright reasons initially IIRC (qwerty was copyrighted, but if you switched some letters around it suddenly was not copyright infringement) and now for historical reason.

In high school, after examining the situation, I quickly decided to go with qwerty for some simple reasons :

- easier to find on new hardware (say, laptop, smartphone with a physical keyboard, etc)

- large software support (in the bios, now uefi, - not a single thing to change)

- good enough support for 8 bit chars (Brazilian Portuguese layout, us international, "canadien normalise"....)

- quick transition to different national layout (I'll be lost for some days, mostly for the commas and periods, but then I will be quickly productive)

You know the saying - you can't change others. You can only change yourself.

So I figured out the best hack was to hack my tastes, not the keyboard ;-)

qwerty might be 1 to 5% less optimal than something else - let's even say 10%. But being suported on 100% of the hardware and software makes all the difference.

Now when I need some hardware on ebay I'm sure I'll find a good qwerty solution. My french friends bitch and moan about the lack of azerty support, and the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users.

"Dvorak, with a larger support failed."

If by failed you mean widespread adoption. But I have been using Dvorak since 1999 on a variety of platforms without a problem. It's a personal success for me.

"the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users."

It's only on extremely rare cases that I've been forced to use QWERTY (such as at a public library) and when doing so, it hasn't been hard. So I don't have to manage different layouts in my head. I only use Dvorak, and my hardware and software supports it.

That said, I don't do any heavy typing on an iPad...